But deep in her heart, Lucia knew she was really a house painter. A wall-coverer. A primer. A coater.

Mornings, she would arrive in her studio and with a sigh take up her brush to finish an abstract portrait or satirical landscape which she had started months earlier. She hated the delicate dabbing and the minute mixing of colours that seemed to be needed to create her works. The endless search for fresh ideas. The pressure to surpass herself every time, as her critics demanded. To excel. To ‘help art ahead’.

She was fed up with art fairs, prize juries, artist-in-residence applications. She was tired of twittering about her own work. Every morning she was unsure how to make it to the end of the day. How to stay on her chair, staring at Illustrator or at a bit of canvas the size of her phone. Every evening, she had grown a little humpier, a little lumpier.

But she would spring back into shape whenever she allowed herself to stretch a big new canvas. She would gesso it with all the violence of a herd of cows on first leaving their byre in spring.

She knew that the larger works did not sell that well. Miniatures were her thing, miniatures was what she had been in the New Yorker for, so miniatures was what she had to produce. Ever since she had been little, teachers and scholarship committees had begged her to use her talent: her ‘sensitive touch’, her ‘delicate shadings’. So much practice, so much sweat. So much sensible investment. A waste to let that go unused.

Beneath the window, the primed canvases were piling up.

But that is what she dreamt of: covering surfaces; measuring her progress in square metres. Changing the entire aspect of a room in a single day. Flinging paint at walls by the pot-full. Instead of creating subtle satires for a sniggering collector to explain to his private guests, she would brighten up someone’s day with a yellow footbridge, or a sky-blue brick wall bounding with the train track. And at the end of each day, something material would have been accomplished.

While doing her work, she might stumble over an old nail or a rusty spot. But she would simply paint them over! And even if she missed a bit here or there, it would not make a difference in the grand scheme of things. O wonderful meeting of light and labour! O concrete paradise! Acrylic dream!

Like this:

It’s hard to decide which Indiana Jones scenes to prefer: the ones where Indiana makes his way through a web of skeletons, metal spikes and slithery creatures set up to deter curious archaeologists; or the ones where he is magically restored, scrubbed face and clean shirt, to his university classroom. Only what does he teach there?

What could Indiana mean there? Are facts not true then, and is the truth not made up of facts?

‘Standard archaeology trowel used in British Archaeology’, photo by HeritageDaily, Caerwent, 25 June 2012, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

That’s difficult to tell. We see the classroom Indiana Jones just a few times in the films. To us, he is like a Classical Greek philosopher: we have only fragments of his ideas. It’s up to us to interpret what he meant by ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, and what important wisdom he apparently wished to impart on his students.

But what he may have said, is that his students have to look for facts first. If they were to start with the truth – with a theory about the site they’re digging up, which may turn into a hope, an expectation of what the place used to be – they might find any facts they want. For, unfortunately, research can be very circular and self-affirming.

Instead, a researcher should be curious first of all. The world is made up of disparate facts, and this needs to be acknowledged first. When, later on, you start to fit them together into some sort of truth, you try to keep this in mind. And you will keep coming back to the multitude of facts, some of which fit this truth, and some of which don’t.

The truth itself does not allow itself simply to be found, because it is spread out over so many facts that all the scientists in the world cannot catalogue it. But you might find a fact or two. If you search for them.

This is one possible meaning of Dr Jones’s lecture. The irony of the movies, of course, is that in the end, Indiana is after the truth: the truth of the holy grail, the truth of his father’s search and his mother’s sacrifice, the truth of the nazis and of greed. ‘X marks the spot’, after all. Or in Hollywood it does.

Here I sit, at my desk, at work, Thursday, eleven o’clock. Everything’s normal, this is where I ought to be.
Or not ought to be. For I am feeling weirdly conflicted about being here.

I work at a university department. And outside my window, my colleagues are on strike.

Employees of European universities have good reasons to be angry.

The way the universities’ money is being divided between hand workers and brain workers, between women and men, en between brown people and pink people, is unequal and becoming even more unequal.

People are paid for only a proportion of the hours they are asked to spend on their work. For teaching, for example, too few hours are being counted by the universities’ managers. Teaching, preparing classes, marking exams, communicating with students, being a mentor: all these things take much more time in reality than what teachers’ bosses seem to think.

A third important problem is that researchers and teachers are being judged by numbers: the numbers of students they attract, the number of doctoral theses they ‘deliver’, the number of articles they publish. Too little value is placed on things that take time and subtlety: helping a student who has problems at home; giving your ideas on the future of education, or helping make your town a nice place to live (feeling that your place has a history and that you are part of it, are important for your well-being); doing more exciting stuff in your classes than ‘going through the literature’ or ‘giving an overview of the period’; coming up with really novel ideas, even if you are no native speaker of common-room English but happen to have been born in China or Cameroon, which makes your articles a little less ‘fun’ to read (English is rapidly becoming the only accepted language for ‘serious’ publications, even though that means many people who are no academics cannot read your research results); or taking the time to read what other researchers have been up to (to prevent that you will be doing the same work all over again!).

So, problems enough. And these problems do not just exist in the UK, where today’s strike is taking place: universities in various European countries, and no doubt elsewhere, face exactly the same issues.

The universities themselves are not always very responsive to these issues. To give just one example: instead of hiring more teachers, they organise ‘relax’ sessions for their existing pool of teachers. One vice chancellor even sent out an email to all his staff, insinuating that they don’t care about their students and that they will be social outcasts if they participate in the strike. This message was almost enough reason for me to join the strikers in front of our building.

But do not universities and their employees share a common goal? Where is the conversation between management and workers? (This is exactly what a colleague also said to me.) Are the managers only there to ensure that their institution has a financial future (and I do understand that that is hard enough). Or a human future as well?

In spite of these issues, The higher education unions of Britain have chosen to focus on the slogan ‘13% pay cut (in real terms) since 2008’.

2008. Precisely. The year the crisis began.
It would not surprise me if real-term pay have been lowered equally drastically across all European sectors, and not just at universities.

Now I need to add that I am new to this environment. I don’t know precisely how unions and strikes and contract negotiations work at universities, and particularly in the country where I work now. This makes my observations stronger, but weaker at the same time: I realise that.
I was quite surprised, for example, to be found guilty of officially crossing a ‘picket-line’ when all I thought I was doing was say hi to my colleagues on strike, go to work and do some writing for myself. I had no idea there was something like an ‘official picket’.

I am doing no teaching or other work for which my bosses could ‘miss’ me at the moment, so I thought there would be no point in me striking (except, perhaps, my presence in the crowd).
All I would harm would be myself. You could even consider that the university is actually doing me a favour at the moment by providing me with an office, internet, supporting staff and tea water. But then again, as the picketers pointed out to me, the very fact that I consider it this way, and that the university does not seem to be valuing sufficiently the enormous contributions of all those PhD-students who teach for little or no salary, short-term contract workers who need to move to a whole different city or even country every three year, and 0-hour-contract, associate and honorary staff, is not right.

There is something rotten here. Education and research need rethinking.

But what I don’t understand, is why unions focus on salary levels, and then send pretty-well-paid members to the streets.
Because where were the cleaners, the data-entrists, the PhD-students, the fixed-contract workers this morning? I spoke to a couple of them at work. They were either afraid of striking/missing out on their meagre income (but didn’t they invent funds and stakingskassen for those people?). Or they felt they owed it to themselves to do their work. Or replied that they were actually quite satisfied with what they are being paid at the moment.
Perhaps even more importantly, where were the professors? (That is to say: I did not see any. But there may have been a few that I have not yet met.) If anyone is in a strong position to speak for those without a steady contract – if anyone has a paternalist obligation towards their juniors, it is them. But perhaps the strike focused too much on salary-levels for them to feel they had reason to protest?

Another thing I don’t fully understand, is why some picketers (only some of them!) try to prevent colleagues and students from entering university buildings, sometimes in quite nasty ways. I read on the English wikipedia that this is a well-worn strategy: ‘harming the business through loss of customers and negative publicity’. But I seriously doubt whether making people dislike you creates any understanding of the issues workers at universities have to deal with – and of the questions about education and research that we all have to deal with, as members of a society.

But all of this calls for a large-scale demonstration by students, parents, teachers – in short: citizens – rather than an employees’ strike.

And here I am, sitting at my desk, at work, scared of running into colleagues on strike (with whom I sympathise very much! Only I don’t see the use of my not meeting a deadline today, and I don’t identify with the pay demand the union has printed on their banners). I’ve only just begun my work here, and I’ve already come out as a scab.

P.S. Look out for my related column on the ‘mad professor’, or the ‘secluded scholar’ (whichever name you prefer), and the problem of ‘public engagement’.

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